Kitchen Failure: Bean Thing

I figure I shouldn't just post my culinary successes; I should also post my failures. As an only averagely talented cook who usually doesn’t follow a recipe, I have many, many failures. Of course, I can’t post everything I cook that turns out terrible because, well, that would just be depressing and not very useful. So I'll only post those that are funny. Here is one:

Yesterday I decided to cook some sort of Mexican thing. This happens a lot with me, actually, and usually it's pretty good. I mean, it's pretty hard to ruin beans, veggies, and cheese.

But I did it. I don't know what I was thinking, but I had some pinto beans that had been soaking, and I decided to fry them up with onion and garlic. This would've been great if the pinto beans were already soft. But they weren't. They were hard, nasty little buggers that took about 40 minutes to soften up. Jesus!

So while my granite beans were cooking and the onion was getting overcooked and mushy (I had to keep adding water for the beans, which made the onion nasty), I decided to toss in a generous amount of my dad’s home-dried pepper flakes. And did I mention that these pepper flakes are really hot? Yep. Like screaming-holy-mother-of-god hot. I think he made them with Habaneros or devil dandruff or something.

Anyway, at this point I had too-spicy rock-hard beans with mushy onions. And then I burnt it. Yep. Right to the bottom of the cast iron pan. God damn it. Unlike any sensible person, who would, at this point, simply toss the mess out on the grass for some poor scavenging animal to eat, I decided to add more water, scrape the bean mess off the bottom of the pan, and continue cooking. I also added some red and green pepper. The kitchen by now smelled of burnt-ness, capsacin, and cumin.

Once the beans were soft enough to eat and I couldn’t stand spending any more time on what was surely going to be a bad lunch, I took the pan off the heat, and, what the hell, I mashed it all up. It’s like refried beans… or something?

Well, doesn't that look... brown?

It looks less revolting when you can hardly see the beans.

I ended up eating it like a street taco, and it wasn’t terrible when you drowned it in salsa and yogurt (I use yogurt instead of sour cream). But no amount of sauce really covers up that burnt taste. Oh, and did I mention that I made a ton of it? So I'll have leftover bad beans for a while now.

Anybody want to come over for Mexican food?

Book Review: Make the Bread, Buy the Butter

I’m sort of into that whole DIY movement and I love cookbooks, so when I heard about Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, in which the author attempts to make all food from scratch and then decides whether it’s worth it by analyzing cost and labor, I was pretty excited. I must say, the book did not disappoint. I read it cover to cover (I must admit I skipped the meat sections) which is unusual for a “cookbook,” but that’s just the thing: it read more like a memoir than anything else. Jennifer Reese (the author) talks about her adventures in food making, but also about her life. The section on chickens was particularly hilarious. Anyway, I’ve written down some of the recipes (homemade yogurt, tortillas, or ginger ale anyone?), and I’ll be sure to try them out soon and let you know how I do!

In the meantime, I recommend this book. It’s at the library, and I’m returning it today.

On a totally unrelated note, I think I’m going to attempt to make vegan Jello shots using agar agar. I found this fabulous cucumber-lime margarita jello shot recipe, and I think it needs making. Anyone know where I can buy agar agar?  

Oh! Oh! One more thing! My dad gave me these weird things called chia seeds. They're super strange; eaten plain they taste like sticking a battery to your tongue, and if you put them in water, they make a sort of jelly. I guess they're super good for you, but I didn't really know what to do with them except put them in smoothies or pizza crust. Until, that is, I found this recipe for chia seed coconut pudding. It is actually pretty delicious! (And it's vegan and gluten free for my diet-restricted friends!)

Couscous!

I like couscous, but I didn't know how to cook it--until now, that is! This recipe is pretty quick and easy because, let's face it, if it wasn't, I wouldn't cook it. And who knew that couscous is probably the easiest thing to cook in the entire world!

Yum. Tangy and satisfying. And maybe even kind of pretty?

I pretty much followed this recipe from Yummly, but I modified it a little because I didn't have olives or eggplant (I finally used up my Costco jar of kalamata olives!) and I was too impatient to wait 45 minutes. Oh, and I added broccoli because I love it. If you have fresh herbs or fresh lemons for juice, use those. But I didn't, and it still tasted great.

• 2 zucchini
• 1 red bell pepper
• 1 head of broccoli
• 2 T minced garlic (I hate chopping garlic, so I buy the pre-minced stuff in a jar.)
• some olive oil
• 3 T balsamic vinegar
• 1 T rosemary   
• 2 12 cups water
• 1 t salt
• 1 1/4 c couscous
• 6 T lemon juice
• 4 T basil 

 (So this recipe calls for cutting the veggies in big chunks, cooking them, and then cutting them into tiny pieces. If that sounds too annoying for you, do it differently of course! The zucchini started to get a little mushy on me, so I might recommend leaving it in biggish pieces until the end, but I think the red pepper and broccoli could be cut up little from the very beginning. This recipe makes me wish I had a Slap-Chop...)

1. Turn the oven on to 400°F, and while it preheats, fry the veggies and garlic in a cast iron skillet that is pretty hot, but not too hot. (Don't burn the garlic like I did!)  Once the veggies have a little brownness on them, spread them on a baking sheet, drizzle olive oil and balsamic vinegar sprinkle with rosemary and salt and pepper. Pop them in the oven for however long you can stand. (I did about 10 minutes.)

2. Bring the 2 1/2 cups water, 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 tablespoon oil to a boil . Stir in couscous. Remove from heat. Let sit for about 5 minutes, and voila! you have magic couscous.

3. When you take the veggies out of the oven, cut them up into little bites. Then mix the veggies with the couscous and add about 1/4 c olive oil, lemon juice, and basil.The recipe says wait 30 minutes before serving, but screw that--just eat it.

This recipe almost tastes better the after it has sat in the fridge for a day. It would be so yummy as a cold summer salad. Om nom nom nom nom.

Crafty To Do List

There are lots of crafts that I want to do. Someday, I will do them.
- tie die a shirt
- finish my afghan
- make a woodblock
- write more library adventures
- knit a sweater with my cat's face on it (I think this will be the best thing ever!)
- do a fancy papercut
- take apart my bathing suit and use it as a pattern to sew a new one
- make a hippie bag
Oh now that I'm thinking of bathing suits, I'm thinking about summer, which I totally CANNOT wait for! It'll be warm enough to bike down to the river and have fun times. And camping! Oh man, I'm so excited!

Cabbage-Salsa Soup

It rained today, which means it’s a good day to make soup. I didn’t want to go shopping so this was going to be one of those cook-what-you-got sorts of soups.

Here’s what I did:

• 1 head of cabbage
• 1 onion
• 1 can of beans (I used kidney beans, but I’m sure any kind would be good)
• Rice (If you have leftover cooked rice, that would be perfect. I didn’t, so I cooked 1 cup of rice. Alternatively, this soup would be good with strips of corn tortillas instead of rice!)
• Salsa (I used almost an entire jar of my uncle’s home-canned. Aw, yeah getting freaky with the home-canned...)
• Tomato juice
• Garlic
• Vinegar (I used apple cider and balsamic. Vinegar is my secret soup ingredient, always!)
• Cumin
• Sriracha
• Vegetable bouillon
• Cilantro
• Salt
• Olive oil

1. Slice the veggies into big bite-sized pieces. (I only had cabbage and onion, but carrots, peppers, celery, etc would be delicious!)

2. Saute the onions and garlic in olive oil. (I just did this in the bottom of my soup pot.)

3. Once the onions are pretty (a little wilted and caramelized, yum), then add everything else!

As for amounts of things, I like the soup to be pretty flavorful, so I add quite a bit. Right at the end, I didn’t think it was tomato-y enough, so I added a little tomato juice and that was nice. I also think this soup would be super yummy with fresh cilantro, but I only had dried... The cumin, I thought, tasted really nice in it, which I wasn’t quite expecting.

I was too hungry to take pictures while cooking, but here's the end result!
Please ignore the messy kitchen?

Good luck with your soup making!

Computer Comfort

So this semester I started an online master's degree program, which means I'm going to have to spend a lot of time sitting at my computer. Ew. Of course, I have a desktop, which means I not only have to be on my computer, but also I have to sit at a desk. Double ew. To make this less horrible, it became necessary for me to pimp out my desk area.

First things first, I got a chair. I found it for $3 at a swap meet. It looked like crap, but it was all wooden, so I hoped it'd clean up nice. I sanded it and stained it, and suddenly I had a very nice-looking chair. Except it wasn't terribly comfy.
So I made a cushion for it! I bought a cushion pad from a craft store and crocheted a cover for it. Unfortunately I didn't notice that the cushion was quite a bit bigger than the chair until I'd finished crocheting the cover for it. Oh well.

Does it look spooky to you?

Ribbon ties! <3

It almost hurts your eyes!

So anyway, that's the chair.
Then I decided I needed one of those keyboard cushions for people who type a lot. So I made one!

I had some extra fabric and for the filling I used rice. Hopefully, I never spill any water on it because then the rice might rot. And that would be really gross.

Now my computer's really comfy, but doing schoolwork still sucks. Hm... Is there a craft project that makes schoolwork not suck?


Patterns: my own

Hats!

I like hats. I like them a lot. I figure one can never have too many hats. But I'm probably getting close.

The pattern for this first hat came from Stitch 'N Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker. Hell, I even tried to use colors and buttons similar to those on the hat in the book because I thought it was so cute. However, I didn't check my gauge, so this hat is too small. Probably it needs to be gifted to one of my smaller-headed friends. You know what they say, "A hat that doesn't fit is only good if it's a yarmulke." And this isn't a yarmulke, and I don't think that's what they say.

Hat model?

Cute ear-flaps, but they don't reach my ears!

I made this next hat because I love cables, and I wanted to use up this yarn I had. Unfortunately, I managed to use up all the yarn before the hat was finished. If you look at the ear-flap, you can see a color change. Oh well. Cables make anything look better, (if you ask me) and they're super fun to knit.

In X-Men, Cable is the son of Cyclops who gets sent to the future!

This next hat is ridiculous. I don't know what I was thinking when I made it. I think I was thinking "beret," but instead it came out like over-sized floppy-hat. Whatever. Maybe it's like one of those Rastafarian hats or something. All I know is I lined this hat with wild print fabric, as if it wasn't ridiculous enough.

Floppy hat powers, go!

This next hat is pretty old, but I like it. When I made it, I was trying to make a Keroppi hat, but most people think the eyes are ears. Anyway, this is one of the best fitting hats I've ever made; I made the back longer than the front, and it covers my ears nicely. But it's pretty silly looking, so I don't wear it too often.

Frog hat! Kero kero...

This next hat is the easiest hat in the world to knit! Basically, you just knit a tube that will fit your head. Once the tube is tall enough to cover enough of your head plus a little extra, you fold it in half and use kitchener stitch to bind the the stitches together. I did the the bottom of the hat in seed stitch (for some reason it's my favorite hat edging) and added some triangles for ear-flaps, but that's totally optional! Oh and I had some random leather scraps that I used as... doinglies(?) on the ends of the ties.

Pointy hat!

Well, that's all. Is that enough hats for you?

Patterns: All are my own except for the one I mentioned from Stitch 'N Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker